With Day 2 out of the way, I can fully relax. I did my talk in the morning, and it seemed to go well - people came up afterwards, and during the day. I did feel bad that I missed on the timing -- I still don't quite have the pacing down, which is annoying. I was even using PowerPoint 2004 (no fruit please), which has really nice slideshow mode tools for showing your notes, elapsed time, and upcomings slides. Matt Raible came up to introduce himself, on the basis that we were both married to Julie's and had eldest daughter's named Abigail.

The ConCom managed to rope Miguel de Icaza into giving a keynote. Miguel's talk was mostly a Mono update -- this is a useful talk for the ApacheCon audience, because the Apache community tends to be mostly underinformed about what's going on with the CLR. I always enjoy watching Miguel speak. There's something about his style that I find both entertaining and endearing. After his talk a bunch of us got into an interesting discussion on the merits of Mono/CLR vs Parrot. People who are interested in the details should pester Miguel.

The only talk that I attended was Scott Johnson's talk on the lessons that they learned while building Feedster. I found it interesting that almost all of the problems that he discussed were operational. Problems with hardware in colos, problems with circuit breakers, problems with system software installation, issues related to database administration. As Scott put it -- we are experts at building search software not at operating big web sites. This reinforces the notion that the success of large internet sites is based on two core competencies, one in the application domain, and the second in operational prowess. Google is the most obvious examplar of this idea. He did mention one tool that I was unaware of: Jeremy Zawodny's MyTop for mysql.

The rest of the afternoon was filled with interesting conversations with people. I ended up going to dinner with a bunch of people from Sun: Danese, Bruno, Andy Tucker, Dave Johnson, Flip Russel and few folks whose names I never quite got. By the time we got back from dinner it was midnight. On the way back to my room I ran into Dirk and Stefano, and we ended up going back to the 24 hour lounge, where we stayed up til 3AM with Santiago and Manoj. Late night conversations like these are one of the best parts of ApacheCon.